Social_Healing,_Trauma_and_the_Law

SCLG2623 Sociology of Terror Major Essay What is the difference between individual and social healing in post-conflict societies' Discuss contrasting the kinds of strategies that have been pursued in relation to memory, trauma, reconciliation, justice and rights. 3,000 Words Forgiving is difficult. The very idea of it can be offensive after horrible events like the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda, or the genocidal violence in Tibet. Even to people outside the victim group, the idea that survivors should forgive following genocide is an affront, an athema. It is inconceivable to them and incomprehensible how victims or anyone else would or should forgive the perpetrators…Nonetheless, forgiving is necessary and desirable. It paves the way for reconciliation and furthers the healing, thereby making a better future possible. -Ervin Staub and Laurie Anne Pearlman (Cited By Jeffrey, 2008: 179) Society is underpinned by standards and expectations as to what social worlds should resemble and how they should operate. But when the very foundations of that world are rocky and open to misuse and abuse, the society is left in a destabilized position. What remains is the question of how these worlds are tolerated in this destabilized form' Can they continue indefinitely in such a way' This place of discomfort is the abject, that which is contrary to everyday harmony. Often the locus of the abject can be expressed in violence. In the case of the Holocaust the abject impacted the individual Jewish people and the wider community of Europe. The meaning that was derived to spark the violence and the meaning that remains are in stark contrast. Another more recent example is that of the war in the former Yugoslavia, and the atrocities that were committed on all sides against one another. Both are instances where a seemingly stable life has turned on its inhabitant’s heads and suddenly rights are removed and suddenly friends and neigbours become the abject. How does a society rebuild itself and remain standing after such a breach' Can the neigbours return to their lives and live together again' Throughout history we have attempted to heal wounds forged through conflict in different ways. Originally at the end of World War I there was the use of the Treaty of Versailles and its ability to “politically and economically annihilated” Germany (Haffner, 1989: 137), culminated in the legacy of the Nazi party. It changed Europe forever, stealing its innocence and replacing it with a grim reality. When a countries laws cease to protect all citizens there is a definite need for the international community to step in. As in the instance of Germany, when people are“…shot, hung, electrocuted, gassed to death by [the state]…for political misdeeds: criticism of the state, membership banned political parties or groups, or for adherence to the “wrong” religion; for moral deeds…homosexuality” (Nagengast: 120). They were no longer accepted as part of the state hence they were not protected by it. As is typically utilized by certain powers wanting to grasp control of populations, part of that control can involve forcibly removing groups from that national identity that they view as not cohesive. This violence can take the form of genocide against a race or peoples, as they may be classed as outsiders to that nation’s identity. Alternatively as in the case of Germany, the Jews were seen to be a threat or stain to the national identity. For example the state of emergency that was created by the Nazi government is highlighted in Article 48 of the Weimar constitution which states: “The president of the Reich may, in the case of a grave disturbance or threat to public security and order, make decisions necessary to reestablish public security, if necessary with the aid of armed forces. To this end he may provisionally suspend the fundamental rights…” (Cited by Agamben 1998: 167). This section of the constitution created a legal loop hole for the Reich to decide that those deemed to be ‘threats to public security to have all fundamental rights revoked and “taken into custody”, i.e. concentration camps without question. It is not hard to envisage how easy it was to take advantage of this power within the German constitution. It allowed for rights to be stripped with the wave of a pen. What one finds in the advent of the Geneva Convention there is this shared ideal that atrocity should not be tolerated and the dead should not remain invisible and silent. The implementation of International law serves the following purpose and is highlighted by Elie Wiesel desire for it to have meaning for the dead and the survivors, is explained when he says “what we all have in common is an obsession not to betray the dead we left behind. They must not be killed again through forgetfulness (Jewish Museum in Sydney - Exhibit). Then at the end of the Second World War and the stark realization that hit Europe, people had stood by an allowed mass atrocities occur. It leads to the development of different various types of social healing. There was the development of the school of thought that if we continued to remember what had happened it will never transpire again. There was the development of the UN and the Geneva Convention, which outlawed ‘genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes’. This enabled the possibility of the Nuremburg Trials to try those in positions of power that had committed these crimes against the Jews and Gypsies of Europe. The law seeks to provide victims with justice and redress inequitable practices. What happens when the law in a country fails to provide this justice and equity' What happens to citizens who become classed as non citizens and fall outside of the protection of the law' International law today seeks to provide this restorative justice to such people. Perhaps the legacy of the Holocaust is that now there is a means of restorative justice available through the United Nations. It provides an alternative source of law when national law fails in its duty of care to its citizens. The use of trials as a means of justice and national reconciliation is a new landscape that is continuing to evolve. It is almost difficult to believe that since the holocaust and the implementation of the Geneva Conventions and application of the Nuremburg trials, it was almost 50 years before the format would be reapplied in the Former Yugoslavia. Through the formation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia by the Security Council’s mandate was the first instance of the application of such crimes as ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’ had been utilized. As Antonio Cassese stated: “Justice is an indispensible ingredient of the process of national reconciliation. It is essential to the restoration of peaceful and normal relations between people who have lived under a reign of terror. It breaks the cycle of violence, hatred and extra-judicial retribution. Thus the peace and justice go hand in hand” (From the ITCY Website’s homepage). The trial process is a means of legitimating the new rule in that country, through a pursuit for truth y way of a legal narrative. The law serves as a means of providing justice, but as it remains it is not justice for all victims, there is a selectivity in place to ensure that the most symbolic perpetrators and faced with the justice of the trial. This means that it also targets individuals, not regimes. Individuals that have fallen under to purview of the mandate as perpetrators have protested that they are only one person in a larger picture. Michael Humphrey portrays the purpose of trials in western society to “proceed by individualizing responsibility and distinguishing between the guilty and the innocent” (2005: 125). Another aspect of these trials is that they are very expensive to run and tend to take an exorbinate amount of time to end. This means that not all victims will be able to come under the preview of the court. It also means that the cases have to be winnable, for if there is a loss it will affect the goal of the trial and the entire process- removing its legitimacy. Another aspect of the trial process that impinges on the ability of victims to achieve justice includes the burden of proof, the costs of trials, and the limitations of the type of war criminals that the International Tribunal will go after. As one can imagine if you don’t have enough proof to prove ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that an individual is guilty under The Geneva Convention then this is going to reduce the legitimacy of the tribunal future cases, in the eyes of the international community. These cases are also very costly hence they want the individuals that they bring to justice to be significant so that it is producing the desired message. Another feature that is problematic about these cases is that they are seeking to criminalise individuals when it is a collective that began the process initially. This means that individuals find it problematic as it is not truly representative of victims nor of perpetrators. Another aspect of social healing and nation rebuilding is the utilization of truth and reconciliation commissions. This is the establishment of a victim’s voice in the community, as a means of legitimating and making visible the parts of society that were previously invisible in the community. It is an attempt to reverse the effects of being disenfranchised in the nation, yet who holds the power in this situation' I would argue that it most definitely is not the victim who is being heard. Those that retain the power is the government that it trying to legitimate itself and the state internally and in the international community. This was highly evident in the example of South Africa’s truth commission. This is not to say that healing cannot occur in the community, those that are chosen to play a part in the spectacle of the commissions hearings are able to voice their stories and take control for a moment in time and say they did that to me or my family member, the catharsis that comes this one can only imagine. Once again a facet of this type of social healing is that it also excludes victims and perpetrators from the process not for the same reasons as trials do but because there is no way that all victims could be heard. Another characteristic that is problematic as it does not necessarily offer an opportunity for justice. In some cases individual perpetrators of crime are even able to seek amnesty for telling their story. This comes to the issue of forgiveness and should punishment be sought or should forgiveness be the primary option. As Jeffery highlights the need behind “forgiveness…is very often driven by political necessity and can be conceived as an expedient practice within politics, rather than one that stands outside of the political realm” (2008: 181). This highlights the fact that reconciliation commissions are usually utilized by governments to legitimize the new government and instigate peace and order where the victims and perpetrators need to continue living side by side as is the South African experience. The politics of memory and its importance is highlighted in the genocidal event of the holocaust. Through the implementation of “transcendental genocide…is based on theories of the absolute need to eliminate all members of a category, because of their intractable vileness, wickedness, dangerousness or opposition” (Preez 1994: 11). Hitler portrayed the Jews as the root cause of all that was wrong with Germany and the only means of recreating all that was once great in their national identity and nation through the elimination of that which contaminated the German State and world alike. Jews were described to be “a cancer within the German social body” (Appagurai 1998: 913) this statement highlights this use of the abject to discredit the Jew’s as people with rights that belong within society. Here they are likened to disease which is always to be eradicated. They are the parasites taking jobs and the livelihood for the German people; hence the governments created this state of emergency whereby the suspension of rational though and disgust at the policies that strip people of their dignity and identity. This served as a further means of creating the Jew as the ‘other’, so that good German folk did not have a problem bearing witness to their mass annihilation. As Kristeva states “the abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things.” (1982: 31). This is what makes the Holocaust so difficult a pill to swallow. The irony of this situation is that it still occurs today and unfortunately people continue to remain invisible to the law and the greater international community till it is inevitably too late. Hence the need is enshrined in the spectacle of the violence to document and ensure that it is never forgotten. The German government has even taken it as far as legislating that it is illegal to deny the holocaust. This is the politics of memory behind the production of Jewish Museums around the world in New York, Sydney, etc to enforce that this did happen and the need for it to never happen again. At the end of the tour of Sydney’s Jewish Museum it finishes with the following quote by Elie Wiesel which I think sums up the politics of memory and the common need to “not to betray the dead we left behind. They must not be killed again through forgetfulness (Jewish Museum in Sydney - Exhibit). If the mass annihilation of an ethnic group “ is unimaginable…its representation must be fit into existing, acceptable discourses: patriotism, retaliation for real and imagined past injustices, separatism, terrorism, communism, subversion, anarchy, the need to preserve the states and territorial integrity, the need to protect the nation from subversion through ethnic cleansing…” (Nagengast: 120; citing Lyotard: 172). This is what the Nazi party did by making the Jew a distinguishable difference to the German national identity by forcing them to wear the Star of David, by tattooing prisoners of concentration camps with numbers. The very fact that each Jew in the concentration camp was numbered dehumanized and removed them as a valuable commodity within that society. They no longer had an identity other than the fact that they were Jewish, similar to that of branding cattle. In this same way “what kept the murdering machine going then was solely its own routine and impetus. The skills of mass murder had to be used simply because they were there” (Bauman 1989: 106) and they were a part of the bureaucracy that failed to see the collective pain of the individuals it destroyed. The aspects of the Holocaust that provide the spectacle and make it so unimaginable is highlighted by Robert Antelme exemplifies how it is “impossible to bridge the gap we discovered opening up between the words at our disposal and the experience…And then even to us, what we had to tell would start to seem unimaginable” (Edkins, 2003: 111 citing 1992.) In the Balkan experience it is almost as if they were attempting to replicate what had occurred in Europe some 50 years previously. Perhaps what is scary is the fact that it is so easy for a people to be ostracized, humiliated and finally annihilated, what’s to stop them one day coming after us. Pastor Martin Niemoeller puts this succinctly when he states that “first the Nazis went after the Jews but I wasn’t a Jew so I did not react. Then they went after the Catholics but I wasn’t a catholic so I did not object. Then they went after the worker but I wasn’t a worker so I didn’t stand up. Then they went after the protestant clergy and by then it was too late for anyone to stand up” (Jewish Museum in Sydney Exhibit). The difficulty with the holocaust as an event is that there are those in the world that wish to deny its existence, according to Yehuda Bauer this is to do with the nature of the subject matter. It is an “event is of such a tremendous magnitude that an ordinary person’s mind is incapable of absorbing it. There will therefore be a natural tendency to run away from it, deny it, and mainly, try to reduce it to shapes and sizes we can cope with” (Weissman, 2004: 23, citing 1978: 30). This highlights the difficulty of translating memory and trauma of others to be consumed by mass populations. Whether this is true considering the wealth of consumption through highly popularized films such as Steven Spielberg’s ‘Schindler’s List’ to less popularized films such as by Istvan Szabo ‘Sunshine’, which document and challenge the event to try and bring a collective meaning to new audiences. Perhaps the greatest legacy of the 20th century will be the experience of the holocaust survivors and their ongoing struggle to keep it fresh in the minds of the world, in honour of their fallen men and women. They have come out of the graves of the dead and risen to be a force to reflect on their ability to survive the worst kind of adversity, their own annihilation the resilience of the Jew is a proof of their success. Elsa Polak says “I feel obligated to leave something of all the suffering…Man created these horrors, but did not invent the language in which to describe them. These memories stayed alive and urged me on without respite” (Edkin, 2003: 127 citing 1995). There struggle is not in vein and they continue on a daily basis to ensure that the world does not forget the time that they stood back while almost 6 million people were murdered in one of history’s darkest moments. Unfortunately when you hear of the Rwandan massacres, the Tibetan massacres, the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, you truly start to appreciate that the world does just stand by and allow these occurrences to continue. Why do you ask, because these people are outsiders and invisible to our radar, as Edmund Burke once said that “the only thing that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. In the attempt to heal the wounds forged through violence I feel that no one method will achieve this and perhaps it will be a continual struggle, but through approaching the violence with the help of trials, truth commissions, and the politics of memory healing and maybe one day forgiveness will be possible. Some atrocities it is questionable as to whether the nation will ever truly be able to rebuild itself and Germany is one of those, such nations. These atrocities I feel will always mark and be in the landscape of people’s minds, politics and the very foundations for our legal systems. It is not something we will ever be able to escape. Bibliography Texts 1. Appadurai, Arjun (1998) ‘Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization’ in Develop and Change, 29: 905-925. 2. Agamben, Giorgio (1995) The Camp as the ‘Nomos’ of the Modern in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power & Bare Life, Stanford University Press (Chapter 7) pp166-180. 3. Bauman, Zygmunt (1989) ‘Social Production of moral indifference’ in Modernity and the Holocaust, Cornell University Press, New York, pp18-23. 4. Bauman, Zygmunt (1989) ‘The role of Bureaucracy in the Holocaust’ in Modernity and the Holocaust, Cornell University Press, New York, pp104-106. 5. Du Preez, Peter (1994) Genocide: The Psychology of Mass Murder, Bowerdean Publishing Co. Ltd, London. 6. Engel, David (2000) The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews, Longman Press, Essex. 7. Edkins, Jenny (2003), ‘Trauma and Memory of Politics’, Cambridge University Press. 8. Feldman, Allen (1995), ‘Ethnographic States of Emergency’ in Carolyn Nordstrom & A. Robben (eds.) Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival, Berkley University Press, pp224-253. 9. Geyer, M. (1996) ‘Wartime’, in H. de Vries (ed) Violence, Identity and Self Determination, Stanford University Press, pp80-105. 10. Haffner, Sebastian (1989) ‘Germany’s Self Destruction- The Third Reich from Bismark to Hitler’, Simon and Schuster, London. 11. Horowitz, Irving (1976) Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder, Transaction Books, New Jersey. 12. Humphrey, Michael (2000), ‘From Terror to Trauma: Commisioning Truth from Reconciliation’, Social Identities 6(1): 7-27. 13. Humphrey, Michael (2002), ‘The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation: From Terror to Trauma’, Routledge, London. 14. Jeffery, Renee (2008), ‘To Forgive the Unforgivable' Evil and the Ethics of Forgiveness in International Relations’ in Confromting Evil in International Relations: Ethical Responses to Problems of Moral Agency, Renee Jeffery (ed.), Palgrave MacMillan, New York, pp179-211. 15. Lang Jr., Anthony F. (2008), ‘Evil, Agency and Punishment’ in Confromting Evil in International Relations: Ethical Responses to Problems of Moral Agency, Renee Jeffery (ed.), Palgrave MacMillan, New York, pp89-114. 16. Kristeva, Julia (1982) ‘Approaching Abjection’ Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, new York Columbia University Press, pp1-31. 17. Meister, R (2005), ‘Ways of Winning: The Costs of Moral Victory in Transistional Regimes’, in Alan D Schrift (ed.), Modernity and the Problem of Evil, Bloomington & Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, pp 85-111. 18. Nagengast, Carol (1994) ‘Violence, Terror and the Crisis of the State’. Annual Review of Anthropology 23:109-36. 19. Philpott, Daniel (2008), ‘Reconciliation: An Ethic for responding to Evil in Global Politics’ in Confromting Evil in International Relations: Ethical Responses to Problems of Moral Agency, Renee Jeffery (ed.), Palgrave MacMillan, New York, pp115-150. 20. Scarry, Elaine (1985) ‘The Structure of Torture’, in The Body in Pain, pp27-59. 21. Signal, John and Weinfield, Morton (1989) ‘Trauma and Rebirth: Intergenerational Effects of the Holocaust’, Praeger, New York. 22. Teitel, RG (2003) Transnational Justice genealogy, Harvard Journal of Human Rights, 16: 69-94. 23. Wiseman, Gary (1995) ‘A fantasy of Witnessing’, Media, Culture & Society, 17, pp279-307. 24. Weissman, Gary, (2004), Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust, Cornell University Press, Ithaca. Websites and Other Sources 1. Jewish Museum Exhibit 2. ICTY Website http://www.icty.org/sections/AbouttheICTY 3. Nuremburg Trials Website http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/meetthedefendants.html -------------------------------------------- [ 1 ]. Ervin Staub and Laurie Anne Pearlman, “Healing, Reconciliation, and Forgiving after Genocide and Other Collective Violence,” in Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Religion, Public Policy and Conflict Transformation, ed. Raymond G. Helmick and Rodney L. Petersen (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2001), 207.